Art of a Jewish Woman by Henry Massie

Street, which sloped down two blocks from a small rise. At the top of the rise stood the large Catholic church, cream and pale blue plaster over a wooden frame. The fields began behind it. The houses were plain and small, mostly one story but a few, like Felice’s, had a second story to provide extra bedrooms under the dormers. Since it wasn’t a market day, the village was quiet, the tranquility belying the disaster descending on its inhabitants.
    Her parents’ letters hadn’t prepared her for what she saw when she walked through the door of her home. They hadn’t wanted to frighten her. Her mother, father, nineteen year-old-sister Miriam, and thirteen-year-old brother Berci were crowded into one room. Once comfortably off, they had been forced to take in boarders who like them had been dispossessed of their livelihood. Moses Ozerovicz had once been mayor of the town and organized the charity fund for the poor; now the communal relief workers stopped by with donations of little plates of food for the Ozerovicz family.
    Felice’s small town was starving before her eyes. She knew things had changed from the news she received in France and Palestine, but she had no idea it was this bad. The Poles didn’t use mechanization to make a systematic extermination of the Jews. They didn’t use social scientists and construct buildings for the purpose like the Germans. The government just took people’s homes and businesses away from them and proceeded to make them penniless, to exterminate them with starvation.
    “It was a catastrophe. It was not a foreboding of the future; they were already a dying people. Part of me started dying with them. When I took a walk in the square, I saw the tubercular shoulders and ribs of the people. I thought I would die of horror.” She would never forget it. They were starving. She would look into the Jewish shops and see a nail for sale here, a nail there, a piece of food here, a piece of food there, and she would think, how do they sell it? The Poles had put signs over the doors that said, Entrance for Dogs. “How do they live on that? How do they eat? How do they live like that? The questions tormented me,” she later recounted.
    From the twenty-odd dollars that remained of Eliyahu’s gift and her last paycheck she gave $10 to her family and kept $10 for the voyage to America. The ticket that her uncle in New Haven had sent could be used on the MS Pilsudsky departing in two weeks from Gydynia, Poland’s new port on the Baltic. During those last days at home she retraced familiar paths that formed the borders between town and fields. She walked along the Bug River (pronounced Boog) and walked to the granary that had been confiscated from her father under the anti-Semitic racial laws. At the grain mill she watched the plodding horses walk the grindstone around and around in a circle. She escaped the afternoon heat under a tree in the square or in the room in the house that remained for her family. As always she escaped into books—popular novels and philosophy. She had never had more than three or four close friends in the village because so much of her life had been spent at boarding school, and all except one had left for Warsaw, Palestine, Mexico, and New Zealand. Her remaining friend, Abraham Nissenovicz, her former mathematics tutor, was getting ready to leave for America on the same boat as she.
    Her father looked her straight in the eyes and said, “Did you ever imagine such misery in our family?” She had no answer, but she had a lot of tears. Her father didn’t cry. Her mother cried and Miriam cried. While she was there, Miriam made a gesture as if to kill herself. On a crisp night she went to the outside toilet and sat there without a wrap. She said she was going to wait until she froze to death. But Felice had to go to the toilet later and found Miriam chilled and stiffly bent as if freezing. She asked Felice to allow her to die. She was so angry and envious that there was